Baremetrics

MAY 7, 2019

Choosing the right combination of funding for your business is just as fundamental as choosing the right co-founders (or not), the right market, the right product, and the right team. million – about half of all the cash they had on hand – to buy out their main venture capital investors after eight years since founding.

Finance 111

Finance Startup SaaS Payments Payment Methods 111

Point Nine Land

JUNE 22, 2023

SaaS companies in particular have high gross margins (no IT admin) and recurring revenues (subscriptions), a combination which means they can re-invest a substantial piece of their revenue into (hopefully) predictable growth. It’s not very surprising then that we’ve built, invested in, and bought a ton of software over the last few decades.

Outsourcing Services 59

Outsourcing Services Underperforming Technical Team Outsourced Development AI 59

Sales Hacker

AUGUST 4, 2020

Years later, he’s got a thriving business that is not venture capital backed. Years later, he’s got a thriving business but one that is not venture capital backed. Sam Jacobs: Have you developed a process to answer that question of should you hire, should you fire? How do you evaluate talent?

Scale 105

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Outsourcing Services 105

The Angel VC

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 106

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 106

SaaStr

OCTOBER 31, 2019

Before I joined the venture capital industry many years ago, I was a software developer, and I worked for a startup around the 2000 time period. Now, I’m a venture capital investor. Many of these are names that you know, and this is actually the largest we’ve seen in history. How long can this last?

Cloud 101

Cloud Scale AWS Machine Learning 101

SaaStr

JANUARY 10, 2020

To date Bob has raised over $15m with Crossbeam from friends of the show including Andy @ Uncork, Matt @ Firstmark, Bill @ First Round and Matt @ Salesforce Ventures, to name a few. Prior to Crossbeam, Bob founded Stitched, a powerful ETL service built for developers that was acquired by Talend in 2018.

Sales Hiring 135

Sales Hiring Scale Outsourcing Services CTO Hire 135

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2019

How can one prevent their customer support team from being a wall of protection for the product and eng team? Stripe recently announced their 5th office would be… “remote”, so how does Parker feel about the building of remote teams? What are the most important things when establishing your first remote team?

VP of Engineering 138

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Systems Review 138

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 14, 2022

What the soon-to-be podcast host and venture capitalist calls to mind is a somewhat forgettable scene where Peter Thiel becomes Facebook’s first major investor. It was the first time Harry came across venture capital, and, he tells us, he was instantly hooked. There’s no right way to do venture. Delighted to have you.

Venture Capital 129

Venture Capital Interviewing Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team 129

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 16, 2020

What does it take to scale a sales team successfully? I’ve heard so many good things from Kobie, now at Upfront, and then also the team at Openview. Andy MacMillan: I started my career in tech actually as a developer. How does one instil volume based pricing without disincentivizing usage? Andy MacMillan: Excellent.

Sales Hiring 232

Sales Hiring Scale Leadership Sales Enablement 232

Kellblog

AUGUST 13, 2019

Most investors will want you to have about a year in the seat before considering investing. If you’re immediately dispatched to Sand Hill Road in search of capital, you’ll be out pitching the company poorly instead of learning the business and making plans to improve it. First-time, non-founder CEOs. ”). [3]

Software Review 76

Software Review Startup Sales Hiring Software 76

SaaStr

JULY 12, 2022

Now, I just invest in SasS companies. You have to create a repeatable process if you’re going to scale up the sales team. The Number One Job of a VP Sales is Recruiting a Great Team. Your VP of Sales’ number one job is getting eight to 10 great people on you team. That’s my background. laughter].

Sales Hiring 277

Sales Hiring Part-Time VPE VP of Engineering Sales Recruiting 277

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 4, 2020

I’ve been in software since the ’90s and for over 20 years, nearly that entire time, we’ve been talking about digital transformation, developing strategies, architecting new technologies, and moving beyond digitization to rethinking our businesses, our products, and our services in a way that’s optimized for a digital world.

Scale 166

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring Branding 166

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

We were both in business school, and my aha was I was spending some time at a local venture capital firm helping with them just thinking about how do we grow these companies, saying, “What’s the plan? Increasingly organizations talk about B2D marketing, to developers. Some developer’s tinkering with something.

Scale 109

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 109

SaaStr

JULY 1, 2021

The second is pulling more around values, and how we approached team building. Even as a three person team, we went through an exercise to figure out what do we stand for, as a team? Sam : This is not my insight, but someone else says… I really do believe it, that the team you build is the company you build.

VP of Engineering 284

VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 284

SaaStr

JULY 8, 2020

What Nobody Tells You About Seed Investing with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder and Partner Aileen Lee. Aileen Lee | Founder @ Cowboy Ventures. I think it gives us a perspective that maybe we don’t get in some other places, in addition to many great investments over the years.

Investment 169

Investment Technical Review Part-Time VPE Development Team Review 169

Outseta

OCTOBER 15, 2018

Investment funds like Indie.VC Venture capital is not inherently bad or the manifestation of greed and commitments to impossible-to-deliver growth. Their first round of Angel investment in 2008 had not been a round for the sake of raising a round, or funds really even earmarked to invest heavily in growth.

CTO Hire 65

CTO Hire CTO Coach SaaS New CTO 65

Point Nine Land

DECEMBER 12, 2018

While this is generally true for most companies, it’s particularly true for SaaS businesses, which invest heavily in product development, sales, and marketing upfront and get payments from customers over a delayed period of time, usually several years. The main reason is that your customer acquisition costs are highly front-loaded.

Sales Recruiting 61

Sales Recruiting SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Scale 61

SaaStr

AUGUST 12, 2022

You would take three to four years to deploy it for new investments, not follow-ons but new investments. And they’ve probably cut the amount they want to invest in the next 12 months by half to 66% because of the math. They’ve cut the amount they want to invest. So you’d raise $100 million fund.

Scale 226

Scale SaaS Payments Scaling SaaS 226

FastSpring

DECEMBER 8, 2022

And we had a variety of software offerings, everything from WordPress themes and plugins, a local development tool called Local and then had very SaaS like elements to our offering there. But I think you also need to take into account like the total addressable market, and your time and investment. I think that was surprising for me.

Payment Methods 78

Payment Methods Payment Solutions SaaS Payments Software Review 78

Baremetrics

APRIL 16, 2021

Sweat equity and credit cards, personal lines of credit, direct cash investment into the business in the form of an equity stake or a related-party loan to the company, deferring cash-pay compensation. Future capital providers love to see that you’ve invested more than your time into your endeavor. Types of Capital.

Venture Capital 66

Venture Capital Technical Review Underperforming Technical Team SaaS 66

Trint

NOVEMBER 23, 2020

I’d never been exposed to software developers and the mysterious world of coding. I was introduced to a team of software engineers who’d been working on tech that aligned audio and text so that you could follow it like karaoke. I remember saying to the team, “We just invented the future.” But numbers alone won’t get investment.

Branding 130

Branding Advertising Underperforming Technical Team VP of Engineering 130

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 1, 2020

If you missed episode 137, check it out here: Team Selling: A Comeback Story for 2021 with Trish Bertuzzi. Learn how modern sales teams win deals now at 6sense.com/saleshacker. It’s a bad look, it’s a bad way to end your relationship. And a lot of that early founding team came from ExactTarget lineage.

VP of Engineering 63

VP of Engineering Branding Scale Marketing 63

Neil Patel

JANUARY 11, 2021

You can then use it to arrange for the required capital to launch your product or service. Follow this up by building your team and finding a location if you’re opening a physical store. After all, your customers would prefer more of a good thing and less of a bad thing. Solve a problem you identify. Online Crowdfunding.

Underperforming Technical Team 128

Underperforming Technical Team Business Sales Hiring Scale 128

SaaStr

AUGUST 19, 2022

And also on the side, doing a strategy of pure, just changing our ICP and fully picking it and making it super narrow and super focused, and having 25% of the team doing that. And 75% of the team continuing business as usual. No one has an engineering team with the time to build anything. Is that a good investment to make?

Scale 248

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling VP of Engineering 248

Chart Mogul

SEPTEMBER 15, 2023

5 Reasons I Hate the Rule of 40 by Mikael Johnsson, SaaS Nordic While not necessarily completely useless, I would strongly argue that R40 is a metric applicable to the world of PE and public markets investing and is not a good metric for assessing the quality of venture-stage companies.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Sales Hiring SaaS 52

SaaStr

MARCH 8, 2019

We were both in business school, and my aha was I was spending some time at a local venture capital firm helping with them just thinking about how do we grow these companies, saying, “What’s the plan? Increasingly organizations talk about B2D marketing, to developers. Some developer’s tinkering with something.

Scale 53

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Social Media 53

ChurnZero

APRIL 27, 2021

As ChurnZero recently secured a Series B investment bringing our total funding that has been raised to date to $35 million, we thought we’d take a look back and see the role that Customer Success plays at each respective stage of funding for SaaS companies. And we thought, who better to ask than those that chose to invest in us along the way.

Scale 98

Scale Customer Success Payments Underperforming Technical Team 98

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

When it comes to launching sales teams in hyper-growth startups, few people have walked the walk as much as Maggie Hott. We recently sat down with Maggie to chat about all things sales – from laying down a solid foundation to hiring the right people and, finally, scaling the team into hyper-growth. Look for the team players.

Scale 118

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Underperforming Technical Team 118

SaaStr

MAY 27, 2020

When the future is predictable, people like to invest. That happens in venture capital, and that’s happening right now. Every venture capitalist is stress testing his or her own portfolio. It’s much easier to look at bright eyed and bushy tailed new investments. This is the US Venture Capital Market.

Technical Review 212

Technical Review Payment Services Payment Methods Development Team Review 212

Neil Patel

MARCH 21, 2023

We all have a great team and support network behind us. If you don’t respect your partner(s), your team won’t last long. Fill your team with people who have great character and you’re well on your way to success. Your customers’ complaints are how you identify your business’s weaknesses.

Entrepreneurship 92

Entrepreneurship Underperforming Technical Team Entertainment Company Culture 92

ProfitWell

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Do you gun straight for the glamour (and pressure) of venture capital investment? What about a venture capitalist who might be sympathetic to your mission? Going into the pursuit of funding without a plan can lead you nowhere—or, even worse, leave you saddled with a funding plan that’s bad for you and your business.

Venture Capital 56

Venture Capital Scale SaaS Benchmarks 56

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

The SaaStock team will be landing in São Paulo to run the region’s first Pan-Latin American SaaS conference, SaaStock LatAm. Meet Our Speakers… Patrick Arippol, Managing Director of Early Stage Investments, DGF Investimentos. He is leading DGF Investimentos’ specialized early-stage investment group – DGF Inova.

Technical Review 207

Technical Review Scale Entrepreneurship Sales Hiring 207

Sales Hacker

OCTOBER 13, 2020

Managing a technical team as a non-technical person [24:13]. Okay, it’s not that easy, but Sapper Consulting has built REGIE to keep the promise of sales enablement alive and keep your team doing what they do best, which is winning. RELATED: How To Build A Data Drive Sales Team. Ideas Ryan finds transformative [29:33].

Marketplace as a Service 94

Marketplace as a Service CTO Hire Sales Recruiting Data 94

Outseta

JANUARY 20, 2020

I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. They were clearly property management and software development, and as someone that was hired to accelerate Buildium’s growth I immediately saw countless opportunities to grow the company by moving into new markets. We mostly succeeded. I’m proud of all that.

SaaS Payments 145

SaaS Payments Sales Hiring Payment Methods Payment Services 145

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2019

Join this panel of investors from Connect Ventures, Blossom Capital, Dawn Capital, The Family, and Indico Partners as they provide an overview of the current investment landscape, and discuss whether the seed stage is emerging as the new Series A. Pietro Bezza | Managing Partner @ Connect Ventures. Emilie : Okay.

New CTO 154

New CTO Sales Hiring B2C CTO Hire 154

SaaStr

JULY 28, 2021

My marketing team wanted me to do the world’s most boring video. Bootstrapped because nobody in their right mind would have actually invested in us back then and took it up until 2014 as a bootstrapped company. Frankly, we got some bad advice from VCs in the early days. Venture capitals are playing a numbers game.

Startup 278

Startup CTO Hire Sales Hiring CTO Coach 278

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

How does David think about scaling sales teams? Number two, you have a team of people that you’ve worked with before and some of whom will come along with you. David Skok: So I actually, I’m definitely a believer that it definitely gets easier and I think we see that in our venture investments too.

Scale 197

Scale Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Sales Recruiting 197